An Egyptian blogger crosses red lines

When the Gulf War broke out in 1990, the world watched the horrors of conflict on live television. It caused a massive leap in media. When the Internet became widely accessible later that decade, the exchange of information in a single second signaled the dawn of another new age. News not only proliferated, it could be seen by anyone with online access. At the start of the new millennium, blogs became an easy and open way for anyone to write free of restrictions or censorship, about any topic of interest, be it personal, technical, economic, politically oppositional, or in support of a specific cause.

In the Middle East, where the masses toil beneath
dictatorial rulers and tyrannical governments, the people found in the Internet, and in blogging specifically, the only means to move against, to oppose, to vent
about the difficult circumstances under which they have been forced to live as
a result of their subjugation by their governments. Governments have sealed
every other avenue for freedom of opinion and expression, be it in print, radio
or television broadcast, so the masses could remain in submission without
objections.

Therefore, the bloggers of the Middle
East have turned their blogs into forums for opposition within
their respective countries, where they criticize rampant corruption and blame
their governments and leaders in no uncertain terms. This had been a
longstanding red line for all forms of traditional media throughout the region.
But then bloggers began calling on their leaders by name to account for their
actions, and began to directly assign blame for the problems perpetrated by
those leaders and their dictatorships.

Bloggers began launching campaigns for change in their
respective countries and began uncovering endemic and widespread corruption,
chief among them torture in police custody and election irregularities in Egypt, Iran,
and Tunisia, and human
rights concerns in Saudi Arabia
and Bahrain, and child labor
in the United Arab Emirates.
They created a new paradigm for citizen journalism, which was facilitated by
their presence among the people and their possession of simple technological
innovations like digital cameras and telephones containing still and video
cameras. They became the primary and more trusted source of news, so much so
that many independent newspapers and television channels have relied on their
services.

Because of all of that and due to their efforts to effect
reforms in their region, they elicited a sense of alarm among governments,
which felt that their power over events was compromised. That, in turn, resulted
in stern and forceful reactions from those governments. They issued new laws to
restrict the exchange of information and took on select individuals directly, as
when Egyptian blogger Karim Amer was thrown in jail under the guise of having
insulted the president of the republic and the Islamic faith. Similarly, in Iran,
criticizing the organs or the system of government comes at a price. There the
law prohibits publishing any material that promotes extravagance or luxury or
harms the precepts of the Islamic republic, all of which can be broadly
interpreted to include any case at the whim of the regime.

And so bloggers find themselves on the front lines of the
confrontation between government and opposition; they have, from my point of
view—as an Egyptian blogger—effectively become the vanguard of the opposition, supplanting
the political parties, all of which have succumbed to the government and have
in the process lost all relevance and importance. It is Egyptian bloggers, and
they alone in all of Egypt,
that criticize the government directly and uncover rampant corruption
throughout the state’s various organs. It is they who vehemently oppose the “inheritance”
[a widely used term in Egypt
denoting the passing of the presidency from Hosni Mubarak to his son Gamal]. It
is they who have developed a rapport and an importance with a rising generation
of Egyptians, so much so that Egyptian youth can be seen on the street
recording incidents such as police corruption or bribe-taking on their phones.
You can hear them in the video footage saying: Film what’s happening and we’ll
send it to this or that blog.

At the outset, the Egyptian government adopted a policy of
detaining bloggers, most of the time at demonstrations or protests in Cairo. They would be
beaten or tortured and eventually released. The authorities would then repeat
this tactic as many times as it saw fit. But now, after a partial shift in
policy vis-à-vis bloggers that is two-pronged, the government has brought together
young people aligned with the ruling National Democratic Party who are
technologically savvy and has released them to battle bloggers online,
primarily on social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Additionally,
the security apparatuses continue to eavesdrop on all means of communication
among bloggers, including telephone and Internet communication—they are even
followed in real time so that authorities can disrupt any attempts at
meaningful mobilization within society before it ever takes place, be it in the
form of demonstrations, meetings, or other types of collective action.

The second element of this new strategy is an emphasis on
provincial bloggers. It is now rare for the more renowned bloggers who are
concentrated in the capital to be detained. They have developed a voice and a
reputation in many countries, especially among civil society and local and
international organizations. Therefore, the authorities don’t usually pursue
those individuals for fear of domestic and external pressure for their release.
That way, Egypt
also retains an external reputation as a place with relative freedom as
evidenced by the fact that those bloggers are writing freely without fear of
arrest. But the authorities continue to monitor their communications and
meetings and inevitably harass them, especially upon leaving or entering Egypt. It has
become commonplace for bloggers to have their laptop computers confiscated on
their way back into the country; these machines are never returned.

The authorities do not allow for new opposition bloggers to
appear in Egypt’s
provincial towns and villages; they immediately arrest anybody who opposes the
government online so as to frighten others in that district or village or town,
and to illustrate the price of taking on the state.

This was the case with the blogger Dia` Gad who lives in a
small town in the Nile Delta. Gad started writing about Egypt’s complicity in the war in Gaza. He was promptly
abducted and could not be found for an entire month until he was found in one
of the country’s prisons. When his location was uncovered a detention order was
immediately issued in order to maintain an air of legality. When I went to his
blog, with which I was not familiar previously, I found that his writings did
not rise to the level of the relentless opposition that many of us employ, but
the government’s goal was to scare those around him into submission.

I am not intimidated by these tactics because Egyptian
bloggers have altered, even if in only in a modest way, the consciousness of a
new generation of Egyptians who know that their rights are being usurped in their
own country and want more than ever to do something about corruption, poverty,
and unemployment.

And while CPJ’s report about bloggers in the Middle East has noted the most important violations—or
perhaps I should say the most infamous violations—in a straightforward and
succinct fashion, it has neglected some points that I hope will be addressed in
the committee’s next report. Chief among those points are:

Lack
of a thorough documentation of the violations endured by bloggers,
especially Egyptian bloggers, who according to a single organization have
been subjected to 160 such violations. The violations noted in the report
are simply the most infamous, but they are relatively old. This is
particularly significant because Egypt’s blogosphere is the
most renowned regionally.

There
are a number of important countries throughout the region, such as Syria, Yemen,
the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco,
whose violations go largely unaddressed. This is not to mention Saudi Arabia,
the biggest perpetrator of Internet censorship regionally.

I
concede that Iran
numerically has more blogs, but Iranian blogs would not have been put
under the spotlight were it not for the recent elections, which received
worldwide attention. Worldwide Iranian blogging is relatively unheard of
because Iran
is the sole country in the region where Farsi is spoken. Nonetheless, I do
not deny the important role of bloggers in the social upheaval witnessed
in Iranian society now. I also concede that these bloggers have leveraged
the opportunity granted to them as a result of the elections in a superb
fashion to project their voices to the world and to uncover what is taking
place in their country, especially since Iran has consistently been
portrayed to the outside world as a monolithic entity where the government
and the people are one and the same. That myth has been shattered by those
bloggers.

The greatest challenge facing critical bloggers in this
region will remain for now their inability to internationalize the problems
that exist in their societies. Having failed to do so, they are not able to
generate collective international pressure on their governments to respond to
the demands for meaningful change and reform. So far, the brunt of bloggers’
effect is domestic, which I consider to be most important at this juncture. This
will remain the case until a thorough revitalization of the consciousness of an
entire generation has taken place so that it can take on the challenges and
sacrifices of change. Once such a solid constituency is in place, the issues at
hand can be effectively internationalized in order to garner the international
pressure that can assist this base of domestic actors in changing the manner
with which the country’s affairs are handled.

An opportunity might present itself through chance, as
recently happened in Iran.
But in that case, the relative strength of the government and weakness of the
domestic constituency for change is what doomed the experiment to fail.
Nonetheless, and in spite of such failure, the experience has led to
significant domestic results like a mobilization of opposition among regular
citizens, and for the first time in a meaningful way against the country’s
religious authorities. Ultimately, the government’s strength and grip on power
are what prevented long-lasting change from taking place.

Although blogging has lost some of its effect with the rise
of social networking sites on the Internet, it will continue to be among the
primary ways for effecting change in the consciousness of rising generations in
this part of the world. They are the ones who must materialize their legitimate
demands for better lives for their own people.

Mohamed Khaled is an Egyptian blogger who has addressed police torture, among other sensitive topics, in his work.